Tying IP address to geography

[Tom Johnson]

Amigos:

I have recently joined the board of our local public radio station, KSFR.  Here in Northern New Mexico we have not had any rating surveys for three-plus years.  Consequently, we know very little about who is listening to what when.

Like most stations these days, we are streaming on the web, and capturing IP addresses of those listeners.  But IP addresses don't tell us much about listeners and their geography.

Can anyone suggest any tools/apps that will help us tease out more fine-grained data related to the actual location of our listeners?  Even something down to the county level would be better than what we now have, but ZIP or census tracts would be the holy grail.

-thanks,
Tom Johnson

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J. T. Johnson
Institute for Analytic Journalism   --   Santa Fe, NM USA
505.577.6482(c)                                    505.473.9646(h)
Twitter: jtjohnson

http://www.jtjohnson.com                  [hidden email]
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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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[Steve Smith]

I'm not up on the current best way to do this, but yes, there are mechanisms... basically multiple lookups.

Unfortunately, the problem isn't going to just be quantization, but there will be some skew...  for example if you look up my IP you would think I live in Chimayo when I live in San Ildefonso... the geolocation can reflect the ISP's registered location which will be skewed toward the kinds of locations where data centers and/or corporate headquarters are placed.   DSL subscribers may do better than Cable providers but Microwavers and Satelliters are sure to be skewed.  I'm not sure about Cellular Donglers... but I'm betting everyone using Verizon in NNM is lumped roughly into one location.

That said, if most of the KSFR folks are streaming from "out of area", just knowing the general locale (continent, country, state, etc.) might be enough.

Hopefully someone has done this recently enough to have a formula for you.  My work required "real time" reverse lookup which is marginally harder than doing it post-data-gathering...

Good luck!
 - Steve

Amigos:

I have recently joined the board of our local public radio station, KSFR.  Here in Northern New Mexico we have not had any rating surveys for three-plus years.  Consequently, we know very little about who is listening to what when.

Like most stations these days, we are streaming on the web, and capturing IP addresses of those listeners.  But IP addresses don't tell us much about listeners and their geography.

Can anyone suggest any tools/apps that will help us tease out more fine-grained data related to the actual location of our listeners?  Even something down to the county level would be better than what we now have, but ZIP or census tracts would be the holy grail.

-thanks,
Tom Johnson

--

==========================================
J. T. Johnson
Institute for Analytic Journalism   --   Santa Fe, NM USA
505.577.6482(c)                                    505.473.9646(h)
Twitter: jtjohnson

http://www.jtjohnson.com                  [hidden email]
==========================================

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org